Tim O'Reilly on Open Source and Linux

Simon Cozens Interviews for Linuxplanet

September 29, 1999

By
Simon Cozens

LinuxPlanet: I guess I don't really
need to ask this, but, by way of introduction,
who are you and what do you do?

Tim O'Reilly:

All right,
heh. I'm Tim O'Reilly, and I'm the founder and
CEO of O'Reilly
and Associates. A lot of people know us
as a book publisher, but we tend to think
of our core competency as really being
technology transfer. In other words, we pay
attention to what the leading developers,
administrators, interesting people in the
technology industry are doing, and we write
it down. And we do that basically through
books; we also manage a number of websites,
xml.com,
we also run conferences. So we're a general
technology information company.

LP: How about you personally,
how did you get involved in the Open Source
movement?

Tim O'Reilly:

Well, you
know, it's funny, because we really have been
involved from quite early on. One of our very
first books was about UNIX, and while UNIX is
not strictly speaking an open source technology
by license, you know, Open Source technically
applies only to certain licenses, but I think
in a broader sense, the Open Source movement is
about independent collaborative development,
and a lot of the early UNIX development was
in fact done that way; it started out at
Bell Labs, but it happened in universities,
and there were all these programs that were
developed by people who were just saying,
``Hey, we need this stuff''.

And so
fairly early on, I started working with UNIX
as a consultant--my company did documentation
consulting, and as we started working with UNIX
we noticed that a lot of really cool programs
didn't have any documentation, so we started
writing it. And so, you know, our business
really grew out of the fact that Open Source
was happening. For example, there was no good
documentation on UUCP, and we were using UUCP,
which is the UNIX dial-up telephone network,
and I wrote a book about it, and that really
became very very widely used and helped UUCP
and USENET spread. We did documentation for the
X Windows System. A lot of these were important
Open Source projects, and because there wasn't
a company behind them, there wasn't anybody to
do documentation.

So we were involved from the early days, but
we didn't really start getting very very active
until really about probably 1997. Now prior to
that, we'd been very active in the early days
of the web and getting the web off the ground;
that also came from this technology transfer
concept--we switched from using UUCP to using
TCP/IP around 1990, 1991, and again we noticed
all this stuff wasn't written down, so we did
the first real book about the internet, which
got a lot of attention. In fact, we've heard
stories that the Mosaic project was inspired
by a piece of junk mail from O'Reilly, that's
how they learnt about the web.

But moving on, starting about 1996 or 1997,
I started to be bothered by the discrepancy
between what I saw in our book sales,
and what was being written about by the
technology press, and in particular, things
came to a head for me around Perl. Our book, Programming
Perl, which we'd originally published
in 1991, had continued to grow in sales in
1994, '95, '96. With the web, it was really
exploding. In fact, the computer book buyer
at Borders told us that in 1996, Programming
Perl was Borders' most profitable book in any
category, and that was just really interesting
for me, because in that same time period,
there was no mention of Programming Perl in the
computer trade press. Instead there was all this
talk about ActiveX, you know, Microsoft ActiveX,
which nobody used. And I decided I wanted to
do something about that, so I started talking
more about Perl, and you know, I'd already been
talking about the Internet, so it was just
an extension of talking about the Internet,
just saying, well, here are these interesting
technologies that are widely used on the
Internet that nobody's talking about.

Anyway, in early 1998, I organised sort of small
private meeting of Open Source developers--at
the time we were calling them `Free Software'
developers--and the reason was also that in my
work of documenting a lot of these programs I
realised that many of these projects had a lot
in common, but the people didn't necessarily
know each other, they didn't talk to each
other. So I knew a lot more of them than knew
each other. Actually, going back a bit, in
1997 we decided to hold a Perl Conference,
and The Perl Conference was a huge success
and it was really exciting for me to have all
these developers who knew each other by email
but had never met in the flesh. So the Open
Source Summit was really an extension of what
had happened at the Perl Conference; I went,
"Gosh, Linus and Larry Wall really ought
to know each other", you know.

So,
I invited the leaders of many of the major
Open Source projects to an all-day private
meeting just to say "what do we have in
common?". But then I also thought "this is a
really good PR opportunity", so we scheduled
a press conference afterwards. And it's funny
because the subject of the meeting was "well,
what do we have in common? And, by the way guys,
there's gonna be a press conference afterwards
so we have to tell them something." But
what was really interesting in that meeting
was that one of the things we discussed was
the problems with the term `free software',
that it had an ambiguous meaning.

For example, Linus said, ``I didn't realise
that `free' has these two different meanings
in English.'' So we started talking about
libre versus gratis, and so on,
and those problems, and Eric Raymond at that
meeting proposed that we use the term `Open
Source' , and there was some heated debate but
reventually everyone agreed that we would go out
there and sign off on that, and so that meeting
was the formal introduction of the term to the
world, and we ended up not long afterwards with
a lot of major, major press, you know, New York
Times, the Forbes story came out of that, and so
I realised that it was very important to start
promoting these things.

I suppose I've
continued to be a bit of a contrarian, even with
respect to Open source; there's been a lot of
attention paid to Linux, and I've always been
the one who keeps trying to say, "Hey, don't
forget some of these other technologies". You
know, for example, I really like to point people
at Paul Vixie, who most people have never heard
of, but in fact, maintains one of the most
important Open Source programs out there, BIND,
the Berkley Internet Name Daemon, that's the
program that makes the whole Internet work,
in terms of at least the naming, all those
URLs, all those email addresses, none of them
would work without Paul Vixie's stuff, and yet
most people have never heard of him. Again,
I think Linux is wonderful, but I also think
that it's very, very important for people to
get below the one buzz-word and to hear about
some of these other projects. So, in addition
to Linux, it's really important for the world
to hear about Perl, for the world to hear about
Python...

LP: Well, maybe not Python...

Tim O'Reilly:

...for the world to hear about many of
the sub-projects: Samba, a lot of the
Internet technologies--Apache, Sendmail.

LP: I know O'Reilly gets criticism,
especially from Richard Stallman, that you
embrace the Open Source movement, but people
have to pay for your books. What do you think
of the Open Content model, is that something
you'll be looking into?

Tim O'Reilly:

Well,
I've always said to Richard that we will
publish books under whatever license an
author wants to publish a book under, and in
fact, we GPL'ed out first book--actually,
I don't know if it's GPL'ed actually, it's
really the license of the Linux Documentation
Project--must be four or five years ago, the Linux
Network Administrator's Guide. Now what we
found was that sales of that book were less,
in our opinion, than they would have been
without that license. and so when I've talked to
authors, I've told them that experience and I've
asked them, "well, what do you want to do?"

And you know, for example, we're working on
a book on Samba which is
going to released under a completely open
license, we're working on some GNOME and GTK
documentation, we've just released a book
Learning Debian GNU/Linux which is
completely free. If the authors are willing
to do that, we're willing to do that. But
I do think that there are some interesting
differences between free software and free
documentation, and that is, you have a certain
amount of free software that's developed for
political reasons: you know, people who are
hard-core Free Software Foundation people do
it because they're trying to duplicate the
functionality of non-free programs. You have an
increasing of free software that's written by
people who have a business model specifically
around Open Source, for example developers
who are funded by RedHat or VA Systems, or for
that matter, O'Reilly--we funded a fair amount of recent work on Perl. Not only do we pay for Larry Wall,
we paid for a major effort to re-integrate
the Windows and Unix versions of Perl. We also
worked to get the Unicode and XML support into
Perl, and so on.

But in general, an awful lot of Open Source
software actually was written by people who were
trying to solve some particular problem they
had. Larry Wall didn't write Perl in a vacuum,
he did it to solve problems in his job. You
know, Larry Augustine just mentioned the work
on the printing sub-system in Cisco. This was
a business problem for Cisco. You look at the
origins of Sendmail, you know, Eric Allman was
just trying to solve a problem that he had; he
was connected to the ARPANET, all these other
researchers at Berkley weren't, he thought
it was easier to write a mail forwarding
program than to give 700 people accounts on
his machine. So software is written to solve a
problem that you have; very few people
write a book--at least in the software world--to
solve their own problem, they do it for the
benefit of other people. Now people do do it for
reputation, that's certainly true, publishing
has always been a reputation game. But a lot
of times, the kind of books that people want
to write, you have to pay them, and sometimes
they want to maximise the revenue. And unlike
Richard, I'm a great believer in `whatever
works'. You know, my goal is to maximize the
amount of useful information.

I also don't believe that necessarily you get
a lot of benefit in the same way from making
documentation completely free. At the end
of the day, a book is its own source code,
it's not as though the content is hidden in
some way. There's certain a role for people
patching things, but people don't, for example,
routinely do all their own patches to the
Linux kernel, they send in patches which
are then integrated by somebody. Well, that
already happens with books; we get comments
all the time which we're integrating, so we
already have a lot of the benefits of an open
process with books regardless of whether or
not they're redistributed for free, and you
get some negatives.

That being said, we're doing a lot of
experimentation, we're basically trying it with
a number of books and we're looking to see what
happens. If the sales are significantly less,
then we'll consider that a bug.

In a certain way, again, a lot has to do with
`what are the objectives of the author?'
For example, if they're saying `we want this
program to spread, we want it to have good
documentation'--for example, that's one of
the issues with Samba, although I have to say,
the book is being written by an O'Reilly staff
author, so we're in a better position to say
`gee, we're willing to fund this' than perhaps
an author who says `gee, over here I have
consulting work and over here I have writing
a book, which one do I do?'

I guess that's a long enough answer to that
question.

LP: Yeah,
I notice that the DocBook reference is going
to be released free?

Tim O'Reilly:

That's right,
the DocBook stuff, yes. Actually that's another
project that we funded originally. We started
working with DocBook back in 1988, in fact,
or 1989.

Related Articles

LP: All
around the conference we're seen more and more
commercial software, closed source software for
Linux. Do you think that as Linux develops its
business reputation, we're going to see more
of this?

Tim O'Reilly:

Yes, oh,
absolutely. I think we're going to see a huge
amount of closed source software ported to
Linux, and what will be really interesting is
whether that software ends up with real Open
Source competitors. You know, there's some
sense in which Linux as a platform and Linux as
an Open Source development technology are not
the same, and that boundary will be blurred,
I guarantee you.

I guess I see Open Source as a wave front,
a weather front that's moving through the
industry, and technologies that are most
productively Open Source at the front end
where you're really doing new and interesting
things. People just don't care after a
while.

I'm not sure that all those technologies that
people are offering, whether it matters if
they are open or closed. Well, it's going to be
interesting--you look, for example, at Oracle
on Linux, you know, that will compete with
postgres SQL or MySQL. We'll see how it goes.